Many types of testing are used to determine mechanical material properties of a specimen. For example, several common tests are designed to subject a test specimen to a load to determine how (or how much) the test specimen deforms under the load. As another example, several common tests are designed to subject a test specimen to a load to determine how the test specimen breaks or how much load is required to break the test specimen.
To be useful, each test should be repeated many times to determine average or characteristic properties of the material being tested. Such repeated testing can be very time consuming and expensive. For example, manually preparing each test specimen and correctly positioning each test specimen in a tester generally requires a skilled technician at least several minutes per test. Further, after each test, the technician has to remove the previous specimen and prepare the tester and the next specimen for the next test, which requires additional time.
The time and expense associated with material testing can increase significantly if special test conditions are needed to perform the test. For example, to determine high temperature material properties of a material, the material may be subjected to a load while in a temperature controlled environment. In this example, the technician may have wait for a temperature change to occur between testing each test specimen. To illustrate, if high temperature testing is to occur at a target temperature significantly above room temperature, the technician may prepare a test specimen in a room temperature environment, attach the test specimen to a tester (which generally will entail opening the temperature controlled environment), and then wait for the temperature controlled environment to stabilize at the target temperature before initiating the test. This cycle is repeated for each test. Thus, each high temperature test can require many times as long to conduct as would be needed to conduct the same test at room temperature. Similar issues arise with testing in other controlled environments, such as low temperature testing and humidity controlled testing.